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About Me

I live and blog in Ann Arbor, Michigan. University of Michigan BA and MA from Eastern Michigan University. One term in the Michigan Army National Guard. The Institute of Land Warfare, Army magazine, Infantry Magazine, Military Review, Naval Institute Proceedings, and Joint Force Quarterly have published my occasional articles. See "Published Works" on the web version for citations.

The Undead Archives

My undead archives pre-Blogger were actually restored to life after Geocities sites went dark. Start at the old home page here.
If you find a link to the old site on the current site or old site, you should be able to replace the "g" in "geocities" with an "r" and make a good link.
Another archived site is here.
It replaces the ".com" with ".ws".
I hope to move all the older archives here (and started that project) but it is really tedious.

Wednesday, April 01, 2015

Let's Revisit the Foolishness

I recently rejected a recent article's claim that (non-Russian) European military power is resurgent. Let's take a peek at Western Europe's most capable military power.

But the characterization of Europe as irrevocably pacifist or weak is more cartoon than reality. In fact, with so many European countries being willing to make meaningful military contributions in the fight against ISIS, we seem to be witnessing a new, more muscular European security leadership.

Today the Royal Navy operates no aircraft carriers and has just 19 combined destroyers and frigates in its fleet.

The British Army is in the process of losing 40 percent of its Challenger main battle tank fleet, 35 percent of its self-propelled heavy artillery pieces, and seeing its numbers shrink from 102,000 to 82,000 troops (a deployable 30,000 reserve element is intended to compensate for this reduction, but recruiting struggles currently present a hurdle).

The Royal Air Force will receive far fewer F-35 Lightning II stealth fighter jets than originally envisioned, while the Ministry of Defense has opted out of a prior commitment toward a final batch of Eurofighter Typhoons (production Tranche 3B).

The government's "Future Force 2020" structure calls for the Army to have one multirole brigade of about 6,500 soldiers to be the enduring element of its high-readiness capability, meaning a single brigade will be available to operate for an extended period in a theater such as Afghanistan.

But ponder the fact that if two of Britain's frigates collide with each other while leaving port, Britain will at a stroke have lost 10% of their surface fleet. Feel the resurgence.

Britain's new, more muscular leaders protest that this hand-wringing is nonsense!

In their defense plans, future British leaders will spend money from God knows where and at the expense of Lord knows what interest group to build new, more muscular weapons for Britain's troops! So there.

Now tell me that exciting tale of Europe's new, more muscular leadership again!

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Note on site statistics: When I strip out the junk hits from Blogger statistics that seem to come and go in waves, I appear to have about 10,000 hits per month.

My old statistics package, Site Meter, seems to miss a lot and even disappears visits after they've appeared.

I just added a new StatCounter. So far it shows far fewer hits than Blogger and is more in line with Site Meter. But I suspect neither of the non-Blogger statistics register hits from social media. So I'm not sure what my audience size is. It is puzzling to me.

Of course, it is quite possible that my failure to use Facebook and Twitter has handicapped me in getting an audience. Or it may be an additional issue. I may be a blogosaur!